Abstract
Maurois’ very success in pursuing a middle way, his aversion to risk and “extremes”—the basis of his appeal to a relatively privileged but threatened educated public in his own time—may be a cause of his failure to speak to those born later into an age that no longer sets great store by “civility.”
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Notes
I cannot resist quoting in this connection an informal written comment from my colleague Professor Suzanne Nash after I asked her to read over the ms. of this article: His becoming outdated may be the inevitable result of the changes that took place from the’ 60’s on, with the emphasis on theory. [...] He believed in the “mutability of knowledge,” not its systematization. He was another kind of intellectual, in tune with his time and thinkers like Valéry and others on both sides of the political spectrum. He must have known this. His Memoirs in the ‘60’s are a “looking back.” His late work on the “new novelists” is interesting in this light. We’ll never have another era like that of the’ 20’s and’ 30’s when being a “man of letters” was not something to apologize for. He didn’t write for academics or specialists. A related way of envisaging the cultural shift that has contributed to Maurois’ loss of prestige and popularity is offered by Robert Muchembled in his La Société policée. Politique et politesse en France du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1998). According to Muchembled, 1968 marked the end of the “golden age of a broadly shared politeness,” that is, of a culture based on the avoidance of “excess, vulgarity, and violence” (p. 262), a “savoir-vivre en République,” which, rooted in the upper classes but widely disseminated in all classes, served to define France as a nation and to hold it together by mitigating social conflict. What Muchembled describes as the new “Temps des incivilités” clearly leaves little room for a writer who himself admitted to excessive “politeness.” A recent study of a friend of Maurois, the once immensely successful, well-regarded portrait painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, presents Blanche in a similar light as a refined product and recorder of a vanished world, the end of which led to his work’s being relegated to museum storerooms and ceasing to be seen as relevant to art or even to art history (Jérôme Neutres, ed., Du Côté de chez Jacques-Émile Blanche: Un salon à la belle époque [Paris: Skira/Flammarion, 2012], pp. 14–20).
Review of Maurois, Sentiments et Coutumes, in Le Monde, 1 March 1935, p. 10, reprinted in Paul Nizan, Articles littéraires et politiques, ed. Anne Mathieu (Paris: Joseph K, 2005), pp. 296–299.
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Sur les Écrivains, ed. Frédéric Grover (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 77.
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© 2014 Lionel Gossman
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Gossman, L. (2014). Concluding Comment: The Limits of the Middle Ground. In: André Maurois (1885–1967): Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Moderate. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402707_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402707_7
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